Apple's iTunes, FaceTime among most heavily trafficked Web services in North America

The iTunes Store now accounts for more than 3 percent of all downstream Web traffic in North America, while FaceTime video chat accounts for 1.4 percent of all upstream Internet usage, new data shows.

Apple's iTunes has grown from 1.9 percent of downstream traffic in May to now holding 3.27 percent, the latest figures from Sandvine show, as reported on Monday by AllThingsD. The share of downstream traffic taken by iTunes grew as file sharing service BitTorrent shrank over the same timespan, from 5.57 percent in May to 4.05 percent.

The amount of traffic used by iTunes ranked it fifth in terms of North American downstream traffic, narrowing the gap with fourth-place BitTorrent.

Remaining the market leader for downstream usage was Netflix, accounting for a massive 31.62 percent of all usage. Taking second place was YouTube with 18.69 percent, followed by general HTTP traffic.

Another Apple service also appeared among the separate list of most popular upstream applications is Apple's FaceTime, which came in 9th place with 1.44 percent of all upstream traffic. That placed Apple ahead of 10th-place finisher Dropbox, which took 1.39 percent of upstream traffic.

In terms of upstream data, BitTorrent consumes by far the greatest share, with a 36.35 percent share. HTTP traffic is in second with 6.03 percent, followed by SSL (5.87 percent), Netflix (4.44 percent), YouTube (3.63 percent) and Skype (2.76 percent).

I use it a lot to speak to my family. Mainly because you can't guarantee the others are actually going to ring on their iPads. I would say a significant percentage of the time the call quality is awful. Screen goes blank, or we can't hear each other so we then switch to Skype which has then so far been perfect.

At work we just use Skype. When you get 25 people on a call though you do start to get a few lagging issues.

Looks like pirating is still huge. And don’t tell me BitTorrent is used primarily for legitimate file sharing. BitTorrent is all about piracy and theft of copyrighted material.

And in some cases it should be used much more. You just have to live outside the USA to understand that. Piracy sometimes is the only way that some people have to access TV shows (that take years to reach the country in question, while the whole internet is already talking about it), for example.

And in some cases it should be used much more. You just have to live outside the USA to understand that. Piracy sometimes is the only way that some people have to access TV shows (that take years to reach the country in question, while the whole internet is already talking about it), for example.

Yeah I don't think the lack of a TV show being shown in a country gives anyone the right to steel it. Most programs come out on DVD which you could just import.